"Oh, that would spoil it," chorused both the young people, whereupon Mrs. Trubbles shook her head, and held firmly to her original suggestion.
Having admired the ornate front, with its delicate Renaissance carvings they went out of the burning sunshine into the cool twilight of the cathedral.
Some service was going on as they entered, and in the dim distance they saw the high altar glittering with gold and silver ornaments, beneath gorgeous draperies of yellow damask depending from the ceiling, and innumerable tapers flared like beautiful glittering stars against the brilliant background.
Numbers of worshippers, with bent heads, were kneeling on the chill marble pavement, telling their beads, or silently moving their lips in prayer, while a priest in splendid vestments, attended by a long train of white-robed acolytes, officiated at the altar, and at intervals the melodious thunder of the organ broke through the monotonous voices of the choir. Placid-looking images of saints, dusky pictures of the Virgin throned amid the hierarchy of heaven, before which burned the lambent flames of slender white candles, many-coloured tapestries representing biblical scenes, heavy gold brocaded hangings, elaborately-carved shrines and the sudden flash of precious metals and strangely-set jewels appeared in every nook and corner of the immense building, while from the silver censers of the acolytes arose the drowsy incense, in white clouds of sensuous perfume, towards the gilded splendour of the huge dome. Here, from the lofty roof, the rapt faces of Evangelists, saints, angels and virgins, looked gravely downward; there, slender shafts of sunlight, streaming in through the painted windows, tinted the white monuments of the dead with rainbow hues, and under all this subdued splendour of colour and beauty, softened by the dusky twilight, knelt a mixed congregation. Bare-footed contadini from distant hill villages, devoutly told their beads next to some dark-visaged soldier in all the bravery of military trappings, and delicately beautiful ladies, arrayed in the latest Milanese fashion, knelt beside bare-breasted peasants with sinewy figures full of the lithe grace and suppressed fierceness of Italian manhood.
"I wonder what Mactab would say to all this?" muttered Otterburn involuntarily, as he thought of the severe humility and bareness of the Kirk o' Tabbylugs.
"Who is Mactab?" asked Victoria in a subdued whisper. Angus chuckled quietly.
"Did I never tell you of Mactab?" he whispered--"oh! I must. He's a prominent minister of the Free Kirk, of the severest principles."
"What are his principles?"
"Eh! what? Oh, he hasn't got any principals! He's a Free Kirk, I tell you. All this heathenish worship would make him take a fit. He believes in nothing, not even an organ, so the Mactab congregation sing dreadfully out of tune, but they make up for this by strength of lungs. They could give that wheezy old 'kist o' whustles' fits in psalmody."
At this moment Mrs. Trubbles, who had been gazing complacently about her with the same sort of interest as she would have taken in a theatre, intimated that she had seen enough, and led the way out into the hot sunshine.